Who Needs OPEC?

If this is even half true, it's going to completely change US relations with the Middle East.

America is sitting on top of a super massive 200 billion barrel Oil Field that could potentially make America Energy Independent and until now has largely gone unnoticed. Thanks to new technology the Bakken Formation in North Dakota could boost America’s Oil reserves by an incredible 10 times, giving western economies the trump card against OPEC’s short squeeze on oil supply and making Iranian and Venezuelan threats of disrupted supply irrelevant.

Whatcha wanna bet the Party of the Donkey will try to block drilling, preferring to cozy up to people like Bashar al-Assad and Ahmadinnerjacket?

What DID Those Israeli Jets Do in Syria?

On 6 Sept, Israeli aircraft did something in Syria. That much is pretty well established. But what exactly happened? Charles Krauthammer has a guess:

Circumstantial evidence points to this being an attack on some nuclear facility provided by North Korea.

Three days earlier, a freighter flying the North Korean flag docked in the Syrian port city of Tartus with a shipment of “cement.” Long way to go for cement. Within days, a top State Department official warned that “there may have been contact between Syria and some secret suppliers for nuclear equipment.” Three days later, the Sept. 19 six-party meeting on dismantling North Korea’s nuclear facilities was suddenly postponed, officially by China, almost certainly at the behest of North Korea.

Apart from the usual suspects — Syria, Iran, Libya, and Russia — only two countries registered strong protests to the Israeli strike: Turkey and North Korea. Turkey we can understand. Its military may have permitted Israel an overflight corridor without ever having told the Islamist civilian government. But North Korea? What business is this of North Korea’s? Unless it was a North Korean facility being hit.

Indeed.

Krauthammer has more thoughts on the future of the Middle East, and as usual, they are well worth reading.

Lieberman: Iran is a Danger We Must Face

My favorite former Democrat is at it again, watching the Middle East like the hawk that he is and observing danger signs the Dhimmicrats would rather ignore:

According to Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner, the U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, the Iranian government has been using the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah to train and organize Iraqi extremists, who are responsible in turn for the murder of American service members.

Gen. Bergner also revealed that the Quds Force--a special unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps whose mission is to finance, arm and equip foreign Islamist terrorist movements--has taken groups of up to 60 Iraqi insurgents at a time and brought them to three camps near Tehran, where they have received instruction in the use of mortars, rockets, improvised explosive devices and other deadly tools of guerrilla warfare that they use against our troops. Iran has also funded its Iraqi proxies generously, to the tune of $3 million a month.

This is the sort of thing that needs to be dealt with quickly and firmly. Mr. Lieberman explains how he would go about it:

America now has a solemn responsibility to utilize the instruments of our national power to convince Tehran to change its behavior, including the immediate cessation of its training and equipping extremists who are killing our troops.

Most of this work must be done by our diplomats, military and intelligence operatives in the field. But Iran's increasingly brazen behavior also presents a test of our political leadership here at home. When Congress reconvenes next week, all of us who are privileged to serve there should set aside whatever partisan or ideological differences divide us to send a clear, strong and unified message to Tehran that it must stop everything it is doing to bring about the death of American service members in Iraq.

The problem is, members of the Party of the Donkey, which, you will remember, found Lieberman not lefty enough for them, aren't interested in stopping the deaths of American war fighters. They believe that the more body bags that pile up, the easier it will be for them to force us out of Iraq, pleasing their rabid anti-war supporters.

In short, we cannot depend on Democrats to support stopping Iran. And thus, there's a very good possibility that we could be in real trouble sometime in the not-too-distant future.